The above statistics are crystal clear: 78 per cent of all global neo-jihadi terrorist plots in the West in the past five years came from autonomous homegrown groups without any connection, direction or control from al-Qaeda Core or its allies. The resurgent al-Qaeda in the West argument has no empirical foundation. The paucity of actual al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist organisation plots compared to the number of autonomous plots refutes the claims by some heads of the Intelligence Community (Hayden, 2008) that all Islamist plots in the West can be traced back to the Afghan-Pakistani border. Far from being the "epicentre of terrorism," this Pakistani region is more like the finishing school of global neo-jihadi terrorism, where a few amateur wannabes are transformed into dangerous terrorists.

How dangerous is global neo-jihadi terrorism?

· 14 plots were successful in terms of incurring any injury and or death (23 per cent)

o Only 2 al-Qaeda core plots in the West in the past two decades were successful (9/11/01 and 7/7/05). Of course, they were among the most devastating, resulting in about 3,000 fatalities for 9/11 and 52 fatalities for 7/7

o 9 were GIA plots against France, from 1994 to 1996 (I have counted the 1996 Paris Port Royal metro station bombing in this total. The total for all of these attacks is 17 fatalities)

o 2 succeeded (2004 Madrid bombings & 2004 Bouyeri assassination of van Gogh)[10 per cent, but only 5 per cent if we do not count the assassination, which requires no training]

o 3 failed to explode

o 16 were detected and arrested beforehand.

The above results seem to indicate that formal training matters. Both al-Qaeda Core and al-Qaeda Affiliate formal training resulted in an approximate success rate of 20 per cent, while lack of training led to a success rate of 10 per cent. So, training doubles the probability of success in a terrorist network.